John Howard Griffin

After spending his childhood in Dallas, Texas, John Howard Griffin moved to France to become a doctor. When he was nineteen, he became a medic and worked as part of the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of Europe, eventually helping transport Jewish people to England. Unfortunately, though, the Nazis soon learned of his involvement in such activities, so he fled the country, returning to the United States and joining the military. As part of the Air Corps, he went to the South Pacific, where he later suffered a concussion so severe that he lost his eyesight and returned home. Blind for the next ten years, he became devoutly Catholic and began publishing fiction and essays about his experience as a blind man. In 1957, he inexplicably regained his sight, and two years later began conducting the social experiment that led to the publication of Black Like Me in 1961. In the decades following this book, Griffin became a civil rights activist, often working with well-known figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Dick Gregory. In 1975—fourteen years after the publication of Black Like Me—members of the Ku Klux Klan jumped Griffin and gave him a life-threatening beating. Thankfully, though, he survived, though he died only five years later due to a struggle against diabetes. He left behind his wife and daughter.